Jakiej metafizyki potrzebuje student teologii dzisiaj? Wprowadzenie do poszukiwań

Abstract

The author presents a project of a book about metaphysics for theology students. The way the book is meant to differ from the books already present on the market is the acknowledgment of a failure of classical metaphysics and, consequently, an attempt to view metaphysics from a wider than just Thomistic perspective. Such a view reveals a twofold aim of the coursebook: (1) breaking a tendency to substitute the so called “Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy” for any metaphysics, (2) acquainting theology students with metaphysical and extrametaphysical projects of the “first philosophy”. The aim of a broad presentation of new studies in metaphysics is to focus not so much on an analysis of detailed philosophical problems, but first of all on developing a new metaphysical imagination. The place of the dogmas of classical “substantial metaphysics”, for which all reality is ready and determined, is to be now taken by “relational imagination”, i.e. imagination which does not consider a relation as a quality, but as a primary form of being. Relation, as a new token of metaphysical imagination implies a whole range of problems, which cannot be overlooked by metaphysics as it is taught today at theology faculties not only for the sake of metaphysics itself, but primarily for the sake of theology, which is now working in majority of cases with a metaphysics completely different from the Thomistic one. Therefore, a lecture in metaphysics for theology students today must be enriched by discoveries made in the philosophy of the 20th century, especially the discovery of “historicity” of man, the world and even God himself (the historicity of Christian Revelation), meeting as a philosophical category, numerous social problems, relational community and the role of language and communication in the process of learning about the world.